Michael Yang is the CEO of a San Francisco based start up called ManyChat. ManyChat is a very user-friendly platform that enables users to create ChatBots without any coding skills. In other words, what was once the domain of software engineers has been democratised and is now accessible to anyone.

What are ChatBots I hear you ask? ChatBots are automated pre-programmed, person to person discussions, which your business can have with your customers. These ChatBots are at the forefront of the way businesses are changing the way they engage with their customers towards a more personalised and conversational approach.

They also allow businesses to have that conversation where their customers are currently chatting with their friends, on well-known platforms such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.

Michael Yang’s company started only 4 years ago and today has over 1 million accounts running on the platform from retail, e-commerce, gyms, beauty salons, restaurants and more. Bessemer Venture Partners ( the VC company behind Yelp, Shopify, Wix, Twillio, Linkedin and Pinterest to name a few) just invested 18 million dollars in Michael’s company citing “ManyChat is at the forefront of a major shift in how businesses market to customers” and that “It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ email lists and static forms get replaced with a more personalized and conversational approach to customer engagement”.

The last part of that citation delves into the world of email marketing. Businesses have been collecting email addresses in order to “nurture” prospects down the sales funnel to eventually bring them to the point of purchase. They have also been used to tackle abandoned shopping carts, customer surveys requests, and more. The big problem with email has always been about delivery.

The process of sending an email and it arriving where you want it to (in your prospects inbox and not the spam filter) and then having the user open the thing, read it and take an action is a long and torturous journey with fairly dismal results relatively speaking. There are so many issues to address such as your sender reputation, warming up your lists and of course the end users’ defensive posture to anything remotely looking like unsolicited mail. Email open rates run at around 6-18% and then click though rates .5%-2%. Not very high.

When you send a message to your ChatBot subscribers – the open rates are closer to 80% and click through rates closer to 30%. That folks is a BIG difference and it goes a long way to understanding why digital marketers are in a frenzy about Messenger Marketing.

When Facebook opened up the Facebook Messenger API – Michael seized the moment and integrated his bot building platform into it, allowing businesses to create chatbots and add them to their Facebook page by replacing the traditional messaging function. Facebook then rolled out some advertising products which allowed businesses to target Facebook community members and drive them into ChatBots converting them to subscribers along the way.

And it is a frictionless process. At no point is the user asked to fill out any form. Facebook already knows your name, surname, email address and probably your phone number. Simply asking a user to click on a prepopulated bubble to confirm his details is LOT more user friendly than asking them to type in their email address – which they are increasingly reluctant to do.

If you have got this far with only a slight amount of interest stirred, this would be the time to sit up and take notice.

Facebook owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. In April 2019, it announced its plans to start a process to combine the behind the scenes platform for these applications and in so doing opening the way to have a single gigantic application such as WeChat in China with it’s 1 billion “active” monthly users. Facebook Messenger currently has over 1.3 billion active users per month around the world.

PeppaWeb Marketing is one of the few ManyChat Certified Messenger Marketing Experts in the world today. A full list can be seen here: https://manychat.com/agency/listing/ – we are currently the ONLY certified expert in France.

We have developed ChatBots (or Messenger Automations as we like to call them) for restaurants, carpet suppliers, construction companies, photographers, insurance agents, property maintenance companies, estate agents and more.

We have developed a unique mobile wallet loyalty card integrated into Facebook Messenger where users can earn points and unlock rewards.

We have developed a promotions automation where businesses can advertise their promotions and users can download the promotions into their mobile wallet.

We have developed the first business directory integrated into Facebook Messenger where Facebook users can quickly search the directory for goods and services, and then be driven directly into the chosen businesses Messenger Automation, where they become that businesses subscriber and where they can engage automatically with them , 24/7 and day of the year.

If you have no Facebook Automation attached to your Facebook Business Page, we should talk.